You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 51: Knut & Luke - The Inverse of Clown World

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

My guests today are Knut Svanholm & Luke De Wolf.  Knut is the author of many classic Bitcoin books including the famous “Bitcoin: Everything Divided by 21 Million”. Luke is the co-author with Knut of Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World (see link to purchase below), and together they co-hosts the “Bitcoin Infinity Show” and publish various books. In this episode, we discuss Knut & Luke’s journeys into Bitcoin and the concept of 'Clown World.' We explore the implications of government actions, the allure of free lunches, and the importance of personal responsibility in navigating today's economic landscape. The conversation emphasizes Bitcoin as a solution for individuals seeking to opt out of the current system and build trustworthy communities. Knut and Luke discuss the transformative potential of Bitcoin, its role in fostering trust and facilitating trade without intermediaries. We discuss the notion of legal tender, Bitcoin ownership, the future of corporations in a Bitcoin economy, and the responsibilities individuals must embrace as they navigate this new financial landscape. We end with the transient nature of stablecoins and CBDCs, and Bitcoin's potential to redistribute wealth and empower individuals. ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follo bstsubscribe and support my work. Thank you! -- SPONSORS -- ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn   ►► Get 10% off on all books, inc. “The Inverse of Clown World”, using the code EFRAT https://bitcoininfinitystore.com ►► Join me in any of these upcoming events:https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events  -- LINKS -- Knut’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/knutsvanholm Knut’s Nostr: https://primal.net/knut Luke’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/lukedewolf Luke’s Nostr: https://primal.net/luke Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigson Efrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigson Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice Support Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson -- CHAPTERS -- 00:00 Coming Up... 01:23 Intro to Knut, Luke & "Clown World" The Book 05:07 Knut's Story 17:58 Luke's Story 26:34 Understanding Clown World and Its Implications 38:56 Solutions to Clown World: Personal Responsibility and Bitcoin 47:05 Meaning of Opting Out 51:49 Scale & Trust in Bitcoin 56:43 Legal Tender vs. Voluntarism 59:47 The Role of Bitcoin in Society 01:00:58 Bitcoin as Legal Tender, Impact of Time Theft & Taxation 01:05:58 The Pendulum of Adoption 01:09:00 Ownership vs. Possession of Bitcoin 01:11:19 Corporations & Bitcoin 01:17:24 Transitioning to a Bitcoin Standard 01:29:20 Stablecoins and CBDCs: A Transitory Phase 01:33:00 Closing Messages

That's where governments are. They don't have any money of their own because they take it by force. So it's not theirs. They can't spend too much on themselves because then they will be chased out of the castle with pitchforks and torches. So they have to spend it on other frivolous shit that nobody asked for to defend why they're there in the first place. So they spend it on ugly art and on government programs that nobody really asked for. in bitcoin you're 100 percent responsible for for everything so if you're spending fiat money on yourself then you care a lot but not as much as if you spend bitcoin because with your bitcoin

you know that this is going to cost me in not only short term but in the long run if you're spending fiat you're actually spending someone else's money because we're borrowing inflation The absolute best thing for responsible behavior is everyone uses Bitcoin and every man for himself. That's how you get to the most responsible type of society. This book is sort of a self-help book disguised as a Bitcoin book, hoping to inspire self-reflection and self-driven change and improvement. Hello and welcome to another great episode of You're the Voice. The show that brings you the best guests and the best topics and all the truth that you can handle and even the truth that you can't handle, but you do it on your own pace. So thanks for being with me. Today I have two great guests. I have Luke the Wolf and Knut, how do you say it, Svanholm?

Svanholm. Svan Holm. Thanks for being with me, guys. Thank you for inviting us. Nice to be here. My pleasure. Yeah, thanks a lot, Efra. It took us some time to pull it off, but here we are. And I'm happy that we're doing that. In the preparation for this episode, I received some homework in the shape of reading a book. there we go and so mine's on the ipad yours is physical which is better i like it um just to show you yeah bitcoin the inverse of clown world basically um this new book the reason i have it

on ipad is because it's brand fucking new and you guys have just like printed it now right yeah just a month back exactly so i still don't have the hard copy but i i was a good student and i read three whole chapters wokeism and incentives and everything was like so yep yep yep yep keep going keep going everything was like yep yep this is for my audience this is it this is it and that's why when we just before we started recording i asked you guys if it's okay to give my audience a discount if they want to purchase the book and you generously said yes so everyone that's listening and one wants to get a copy of the book you'll be getting a 10 discount with my code frat so you'll be able to purchase it in knut and luke's shop and we'll put the link at the show

notes okay now i'm gonna introduce you guys i normally introduce my guests in the beginning of the episode and you guys were so stingy in your biography so you'll have to do it all over again because i don't have many words to describe you other than that knut is the author of many classic bitcoin books including bitcoin everything divided by 21 million and luke is the co-author with knut of bitcoin the inverse of clown world and he's also the co-host of their podcast together the bitcoin infinity show and the bitcoin infinity show has 127 episodes so far formerly it was called the freedom footprint show and i love that name i don't know why you're rebranded but you'll tell me and a short a short um description about the podcast which i was able to find is that your

audience is educated on freedom tools such as bitcoin to emit freedom dioxide and expand your freedom freedom footprint which i love explore deep philosophy practical tools to expand your freedom footprint especially focusing on bitcoin and the related tools and technologies so i encourage everyone to go and check out the podcast we'll put a link to it as well um and i saw knut that you were a captain of a boat before you embarked on your new journey so i'd love to hear that about you and luca i'd love to hear about your background as well and knut just so you know my partner is also a captain of a boat a tugboat so let's go who's going first introductions i'm going first okay well i'm knut and uh yes as you say i wrote a couple of books about bitcoin

And before that, yeah, TLDR, the long story, I was born on the Swedish countryside and grew up on a, I wouldn't say a farm, but close to farms in a villa out on the countryside and traveled a lot. My dad had a lot of international jobs when I grew up. So I went to Africa a couple of times and lived for a couple of months here and a couple of months there. And after that, I, after my, you know, the first 12 years in school, public school, I applied for university. And the first thing I studied was electronics engineering. But at the time, I was really tired of studying and really tired of school, so I only stayed there for one year. I passed all the maths classes, but basically nothing else, because I found all the other stuff boring. I spent my time writing a comedy school play and being involved with the party section of the university instead.

And I failed my studies, and I had to find something else to do. So I turned to what was my passion at the time, which was sailing old sail ships, like 100-year-old boats. Wow. Wooden boats? Wooden boats, yes. Wow. Usually two-masted catches. I love that. So Brixham trawlers, old British fishing boats, actually.

But, yeah, we had sailing schools on board on those in an organization I was a part of for a long time. And I chose to go in my father's footsteps. And if you had done some work at sea as just an able-bodied seaman for a while, you could then apply for the university studies. So my university degree is Master Mariner. And that's what you study when you want to become a sea captain, which was my goal. And after my university studies, I started working on a tall ship and sailing around the Atlantic where I had a lot of spare time. And I visited 45 different countries and I spent my spare time writing songs, studying philosophy and sitting under the stars and thinking about things while crossing the Atlantic and pondering why. All the countries were different, but that the problems were the same, basically, different political systems and whatnot, and made me think a lot.

And I met my now wife during that time, and I have two kids, so I had to find a job closer to home, So I found a job at being the skipper of smaller boats, CTVs, crew transfer vessels, taking personnel and equipment to wind turbines out in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. Wind farm taxi. Wind farm taxi. That's what I was. Eventually, I started working at the office for that shipping company, and I did that for six or seven years, ended up at my last Fiat position was as a crewing manager, which is like an HR manager. So I did the whole office hierarchy ladder climbing thing and simultaneously being frustrated with being stuck in the rat race and the hamster's wheel of the world, I started writing stuff about Bitcoin. I actually started writing when I was out on these crew transfer vessels.

We had one gig where we went out with technicians to a wind turbine, and then they climbed up to the very top to the nozzle, and they hung in lines down the wing, inspecting the wing of the turbine, which took a lot of time. It took all day. So we, the crew of the CTV, just went and moored to another turbine and stayed there for eight to ten hours doing fuck all. So I was like, I did all the paperwork and all my other tasks in about half an hour. And then like, oh, what am I going to do now? And with my ADD brain, that was sort of a kind of a horrible situation. I had a very old Danish colleague, an old AB who fell asleep in his chair and he just sat there staring into the wall for 10 hours. And I'm like, what is this?

What is this kind of superpower not wanting to do stuff all the time? So I got bored with the games on my phone and eventually started writing articles about Bitcoin because I was very interested. so you started writing articles about bitcoin but that was after you got introduced to bitcoin how did that happen i don't remember i don't remember where i first heard about it i don't remember my first purchase i don't remember like it's very blurry the first the first i i thought i i found it like 2015 16 sometime but then i found an old um youtube channel for an old band i had and and there was a bitcoin address you could donate to and that site was put up in 2013 so i must have been into it earlier right even though no one ever donated bitcoin to us at that time so

so like i gradually slipped into this and um in during the the block size wars uh the bitcoin civil wars in in 2017 i i had an article that got sort of semi-viral or for me i cut i counted it as viral because it got 70 000 views which was a lot for for nobody yeah and it was about how to how to take control over your private keys because you needed to do that if you wanted to sell the bitcoin cash fork as soon as possible and you couldn't do that from most the most popular and the most common wallets so i wrote an article about that and a lot of people read that so and at this point i had experienced internet virality once before with my with my old band uh who had been on the front page of the pirate bay for three days they had uh the pirate bay if you remember

the promo things for um for local bands all over the world and we we were lucky enough to become one of those bands so we got a like a hundred thousand youtube views over that weekend uh so so i knew i wanted to do something i was intrigued by the internet and what you could do with it uh and so it's sort of like a computer game and like what can i do here wouldn't it be wonderful if i could if i could you know manage my whole life from my phone one day and uh you know be free and do whatever i wanted and you know there are people that around that do that of course andreas antonopoulos was a big influence not only what he said in his talks before he wrote books about ethereum and stuff but like with everyone back then he was like the biggest

the biggest hero of all the bitcoiners and he had a remarkable lifestyle because being a digital nomad wasn't very common at the time like but he was flying around doing conferences and talking about bitcoin and i i looked at him and i i said to myself i can do that i think i can do that and i started writing more and more and finally i put the articles i had written together into a book to just to see how the process of self-publishing was and then i had a book consisting of my articles up until then which i didn't and i didn't really like the book and that was the only book i had to my name on the internet now so i like ah this doesn't feel very very good i i need to write a proper book so i have something something i can be proud of

and that's how the idea for sovereignty mathematics came to be so i promised myself to to write as best as i could and write a page a day for a whole year wow it was my new year's resolution and of course like with all new year's resolutions i i broke mine and i broke mine after 106 days so wow mathematics is more of a pamphlet than a book but it's a yeah uh it's a pamphlet i'm proud of it's a great it's a darn good pamphlet and uh then i i brought 50 books in my hand luggage to to baltic honey badger in riga in 2019 and gave half away and sold half over the lightning network back in 2019 wow and the rest is history it just took off and i wrote more books i wrote more articles one article featured the sentence imagine everything there is and everything that

ever will be divided by 21 million and that got turned into a audio reading guys one read it and then it turned into a video. Joni Appelberg made a video of it. And in that video, this little equation showed up. And after that, things got weird. People started putting the equation all over their Twitter handles and whatnot and started tattooing the equation into their bodies.

And I thought to myself, holy shit, am I going to be remembered for an equation that makes absolutely no mathematical sense whatsoever? That's embarrassing. but in hindsight i i think most equations don't make any sense to the people living in the time when when when the equations pop up so like uh it's a very memeable it's it's not a mathematical equation as much as a memetic equation if you will yeah it's more of a symbol for many people

for many things it stands for exactly it stands for hope or or something like that and yeah long story short here or a short story long uh do you still sail today uh very rarely yeah and i quit the the story ends with me quitting my fiat job three years ago and going full-time this bitcoin whatever whatever i had no clue what i was going to do but i knew i was going to do something in bitcoin and turns out i wrote more and i started a podcast and i am now doing what i thought i would do or what i hoped i would be able to do all those years back which is traveling the world and going to conferences and you know being an international village idiot amazing i love it and your your base is in sweden still no i moved to spain to spain because it's

warmer here uh-huh and we we had a holiday home here um already so so when i quit my fiat job i decided i needed a change of environment to kick everything off so i took the car and drove down to spain and my family took a plane and we've been living here ever since so since when is that three years back three years so it was just like the beginning of covid more or less like 21 uh yeah or covid had been around for a little while i think the lockdowns had sort of just started just before i left for spain i did a conference in mexico and i remember all the the mask mandates and stuff you were forced to to wear a face diaper on the plane for instance right and i remember seeing a bunch of asians in in full hazmat suits on the plane on the way back

and i thought to myself cut it out guys you're pushing it like they're gonna do this to us if like don't put don't tempt them like no no so yeah the madness was too too tough to resist never forget no never I will never forget that for sure thank you for sharing all that Knut this is really valuable um and I have many questions but before we dive in Luke would you do the same please and introduce yourself? Definitely. And my Bitcoin story is a bit shorter than Knut's, but I'll go back just a little further than that. I'm from Canada originally. And my background there, I'm from Alberta, the freedom-loving province where all the oil is in Canada. And therefore, that makes it Justin Trudeau's enemy number one. And so therefore, conditions weren't great going back

about 10 years since since the little dictator there came into power and I moved from Canada to Finland it's a little over three years ago now it practically it was for a job opportunity but I'd been looking for something interesting to do I'd always been interested in the region wanted to live in Europe generally and my wife and I started decided to have an adventure this was also during covid and uh yeah the the world was pretty crazy but i've been settling in since then and uh in in the meantime the the bitcoin crypto sphere is having a bull market and yes i know i used the bad word and everything but that's what kind of got me in originally it was that the the entire market was going crazy and uh even back in the 2017 cycle i had some exposure to crypto

generally, Ethereum. That's what my office was interested in. So yeah, I unfortunately did not understand Bitcoin at that time, but I had heard about it a little bit and invested a little bit here and there. And then it all crashed and I forgot about it. So that's too bad for me. But then the bull run starts again, this 2020 bull run, and I start to get interested again. And I dive down the rabbit hole while in the process of moving from country to country. It took a little while to go from being into kind of the crypto sphere to being all the way Bitcoin maxi. But over the span of about a year or so and moving to the new country, I eventually got to that Bitcoin is it. And I really wanted to contribute to something.

And the interesting thing there was that there was a company making books, translating books, Bitcoin books into Finnish. so the the country of my my new home the language of my new home and I wanted to be involved I thought it was great it was interesting and and I wanted to help and it turns out that they were Knut's publisher and they wanted to make a podcast with their lovely eloquent author Knut Svanholm. I'd been doing some podcasting before on completely unrelated subjects but I developed the skill set at least to a amateur pro amateur level something like that uh and and we got started and the rest is sort of history knut and i have hit it off we've had a lot of fun making the what was at the time the freedom footprint show uh and then over time it's just grown into more

and more and more we've we've got the book the inverse of clown world now that was really the product of the last couple of years of doing this Freedom Footprint show. And that started out with conversations together a little bit. I knew Knut had been wanting to do some more writing again. And it was all based on ideas that were going back and forth with the book. And once Knut had had an absolute burst of creativity and basically wrote the bones of the thing, like 10 chapters something like that the draft of 10 chapters uh he invited me along to kind of help work on it to sort of help edit at the beginning but that turned into yeah that we we kind of co-wrote the the book together after that it was all these ideas we've been talking

about before anyway um and i'm super proud of it it was my first time trying any kind of writing and honestly this whole thing has been surreal i i i bookmarked this as well with the the the Riga conference, the Baltic honey badger, uh, two years ago, 2022 was my first time ever meeting Bitcoiners in person. It was the first time I met Knute. And since then it's just been a absolutely wild ride. Um, the surreal doesn't end is something we like to say, like, uh, just leaning into Bitcoin has been, has been fantastic. Every time it's just a new opportunity comes up or, or someone new wants to collaborate. It's just like, yes, yes, yes. Let's go for it. And, uh, But that's that's paid dividends. And I still have a fiat job.

But my son is nine months right now. Like it's it's I feel like I could use another. Thank you. Thank you. I feel like I feel like I could use another eight hours in the day or something like that. But it's it's really rewarding and it's a lot of fun. And I get to I'd never I would never have thought that when when I was first getting into Bitcoin that that I'd be here after only a few years. so it's super exciting and yeah that's so you're still mining fiat in order to buy more bitcoin you're still doing i am i am yeah or i don't know maybe maybe we haven't come up with uh bitcoin related business ideas that are i'm fine with people mining fiat for bitcoin i'm fine with that i think it's going to it's still going to be around for a while people mining fiat for bitcoin

no luke is really good at mining fiat so so that's why um you didn't tell us what you do but i uh i'll take your word for it my my day job i work in cyber security so it's uh specifically cyber security for industrial control systems like factories and right related things like that primarily here in finland defending against potential attacks from russia so yeah okay got interesting very cool lots of fun very very cool thank you so much luke i obviously you have no problem with the cold right moving from canada to finland yeah yeah well it's it's uh less cold than than in canada it's it's more north it's it's uh darker in the winters but the summers are fantastic i i just love it here and it in one sense i sort of traded one sort of commie country

for another sort of commie country but but honestly i love finland and and it's it's it's the country that makes the most sense in the world to me and then i like i mean with you know we're we're gonna dive deep into clown world in a second but basically in the clown world we live in right now most of the world is kind of commie or semi-commie so you just have to choose from you know the top down like from the worst in the list because it's very hard to find places that are not like that i mean they exist but you have to make a lot of sacrifices and changes in order to pursue a new life in a non-commy country state i think where would that be well i think the the way you can do it is by joining communities small communities it's not like a whole state

but if you join small communities that manage themselves as uh yeah like standalone uh communities then you find your kind of balance in a normal environment again i don't think it exists today yet in a in a state or in a country i mean obviously we are as bitcoiners we want to say el salvador but it's got its disadvantages as well and we'll touch on that too i would love to hear your your take on it it's one of my questions so yeah like you said there is no place that is perfect these days and you have to find your sovereignty and that's always what I tell my my audience that you know you have to learn how to develop that in your life first and foremost and with your small community and then build things around you and if you have to then

you move and you build it again but we have to learn how to be builders again okay guys before we dive into the questions uh i want to ask the audience to please help this conversation to reach people by liking sharing supporting and subscribing to our channels uh yes it's all gonna be in the show notes and uh there'll be some special offers for you there too okay i want to i want to start with uh with one of the last paragraphs i read in the clown world book why on earth are people still getting upset over people's genders and skin color shortly after almost all western governments forced us to inject a poorly tested experimental drug into our arms made our kids wear masks in schools and let big multinational conglomerates violently grab monopoly positions

in their respective industries by forcing every mom and pop store to close and run out of business that's a long question of course there's an answer to all of this which is more straightforward than you think when the money stops working everything becomes political and a farce the urge for a free lunch got us here and we're about to be forced to pay the damn bill anyway with interest love that all right i let you take this from here please share shed some light on the context to this beautiful paragraph and uh like a an extract for our listeners about the notion of clown world and where we are today now the the um there's there's quite a bit of build up to that paragraph but there is to every other paragraph too so so i guess you'll have to

read the book to to get the bigger picture that's right but in short like uh we talked to guys one about this yesterday milton friedman's quadrants if which is basically a matrix of spending your your money uh on yourself or someone else or or spending someone else's money on yourself or someone else so if you spend your own money on yourself you care about both the price and the quality of what whatever you're buying but if you're spending someone else's money on yourself you care more about the quality than the price which is what happens when you pick a hotel when you're working for a company you always feel that you're entitled to the the more expensive hotel or the more expensive dinner or the more expensive item on the menu whatever it is your filter is

not incentivized to be as strong as it is when you're spending your own money on yourself. And if you're spending your own money on someone else, if it's someone you love, then you might care quite a lot. But if you're spending your own money on someone you care a little, the less you care about the person you're spending the money on, the more you care about the money and the less you care about the quality of whatever you're spending the money on. Because you're not the one receiving whatever the money bought you and the worst case the other the other side of the quadrant like uh is when you spend someone else's money on someone on a third party so when someone spends someone else's money on someone else and in that case you don't have to

care at all and that's where governments are they're in that in that quadrant like and not only that quadrant but often in the very far corner of that quadrant because that's literally all they do they don't have any money of their own because they take it by force so it's not theirs they can't spend too much on themselves because then there will be they will be chased out of the of the castle with pitchforks and torches so they have to spend it on other frivolous shit that nobody asked for just to just to defend why they're there in the first place and why they have a salary in the first place so they spend it on ugly art and they spend it on on government programs that nobody really asked for uh in the in the very far far end of the other corner where

you're spending your money on yourself uh i think there's an even deeper like the the the furthest you can go on that scale is when you spend bitcoin on yourself because in bitcoin you're 100 responsible for for everything so if you're spending fiat money on yourself then you care a lot but not as much as if you spend bitcoin because with your bitcoin you know that this is going to cost me in not only short term but in the long run if you're spending fiat you're actually spending someone else's money because we're borrowing inflation is the the system borrowing from our children so so we're we're spending our children's money which is someone else so we don't care as much because it's other people's children too so so the the absolute best

thing for responsible behavior is everyone uses bitcoin and every man for himself uh that's how you get to the most most responsible type of society and the quote you just gave is a prime example of the opposite where politicians spend money on whatever they they think that the people want in order to get them re-elected so for instance the all the covid measurements like the the lockdowns and the mask mandates and all of that stuff they happen because the politicians think that the people want that the people are in fear of something and the politicians think that the people want them to take responsibility and do something about them which is everyone else except themselves so it's it's partially that and partially because they bought and they're

following orders someone told them to do that not because they necessarily care about the people no but yes i i i do know that that's that is a common interpretation of it but i i don't really buy that conspiratory thing i don't think i don't think governments can be completely incompetent and you know scheming and evil mastermindy at the same time so i think the the most easy explanation is probably the one closer to the truth and i think that politicians want to get re-elected and when the people are crying out for them to do something about it then they try to do the best they can which is uh more often than not not completely horrible they shouldn't do anything i'm not only talking about covid here but about everything they they try to give the people what

they what the people want in order to get the votes okay i i can go into a deep debate with you about this now, but it will take all of our time and I won't. I will just give one example that is not COVID, which is very fresh from my life here. Clearly, I don't think most people in Israel pre-October 7th wanted to live in a state of war for about a year. Now we're about a year into it, right? And then October 7th happened and it happened because it was allowed to have happened because there is no chance in the history of Israel, which I know for about 44 years and many people know for longer, that something like this would have happened without the government or the establishment allowing something like this to happen with

all the levels of security that we have. And so if this has happened with the knowingness of someone or some figures in these circles of governance in Israel, then they obviously wanted something like this to happen so they can justify to go into war, a long war. that will justify other things like taking other properties or buying more weaponry systems or printing more money etc etc and so i would argue that the best interest of the people would have would not have been first on the list for these politicians they would probably have other things that have guided them other interests before you know doing what the public wanted the public was yelling yes go to war wipe gaza which is something that i'm completely against from the moment that october 7th happened but before october 7th no one was yelling this

except for a group in the population once october 7th happened everyone was yelling yeah go wipe them out because they wanted revenge and so my in my uh life in my reality governance is meant in many ways to create situations that then will make the people ask for a solution okay absolutely yeah the problem reaction solution model yeah yes okay two things about this um i'm not saying that it's that black and white that And I phrased it slightly wrong. It's not that politicians do things to get votes. They do things that will make them stay in power.

What they crave is power and they do whatever they need to do to keep that, to stay in power. And for most countries, most of the time in peacetime, that means trying to get the votes. That's what it means, which means giving subsidies to media outlets so that the media outlets are less critical of whatever the government does and doing things that they think will give them votes. That's what it means. And, you know, wartime Israel might not be a good example of an average state. But hey, we're seeing that everywhere. Wartime in many places and, you know, emergencies that are popping out like mushrooms. It became so frequent now to have another emergency and another state of emergency that justifies another action.

So, I mean, I'm with you on everything. I just doubt that it's always because they are doing what the public wants them to do. No, no, that's not what I meant. Okay. If their means of getting into more power is by acting in ways that they think will give them more votes, then they will do things that they think will get them more votes. So it's more complicated. I'm not saying they're doing good things.

They hardly ever do good things. I mean, governments have a free market competition in bads rather than goods. yeah so so so that's the thing and uh but i think these incentive structures make it so in in a uh in inflationary monetary systems this is what always happens because inflation compounds and it becomes exponential after a while and it means uh all the fiat economies economies go to shit and they have to turn into totalitarianism and horrible stuff and civil wars and resets of the system because that is the inevitable outcome when you when you're living on forever credit the bubble needs to burst at some point and before it does you get all these power grab

mechanics happening and i think that's what we're seeing now but i i don't think there's some single entity evil mastermind that concocted the whole thing that's sitting in some lair. I think this is just an effect of an underlying incentive problem stemming from a simple problem in mathematics that interest compounds

and you can't have forever debt. Like it's more like that. But this was a big tangent. Yeah. What were we talking about? The quote in the book, I guess. Yeah, we were talking about the book and the message that the book wants to convey. I mean, the name says a lot, but, you know.

The message we want to convey, like the whole book, is more like the only way to get out of Clown World is on a personal level. You need to take responsibility for your own life and stop participating. And you can do that now. We have Bitcoin. We have Noster and similar things. We have unstoppable communications, unstoppable money, which means we can form societies that don't have to care about what the psychopaths want us to do.

And that's the only way to make it go away. And the more energy and time and effort we give to that new world, which is based on mutual agreements, consensualism, non-aggression, the less of clown world we we get both on a psychological level but on a also on a very like real world literal level because we take the power away from the people that uh that that make this happen you you call it be be anti-clown in the in the in the summary of the book i love it it's like you you lay down in the first few episodes how the world looks like today and the reality and how we got into clown world

and the whole Marxist culture that has been probably integrated into societies, Western societies for the last decades. And now we are kind of dealing with the manifestation of that, I would say, secretive Marxist, like sheep's and wolf clothing, right? People don't realize that that's the kind of reality they live in. And they live in this illusion of a free, liberal, democratic society, thinking that this modern life is very different than what their grandparents lived through in some other countries in history. And really, when you do stop to learn history and to see the resemblances between the processes that took part a hundred years ago to the processes that are taking part these days, you find amazing resemblances. and you just have to like be smart enough to accept the new terms the new definitions the new norms but it really we're we're reliving the same the same regimes right yeah the same

the same basic structures are still there we're still governed by entities that that take their resources from the people and that's the entity that has the monopoly on violence in every in every country on earth another concept from the book is that like an idea i had for a long time about how um the the root of all evil is the urge for there to be a free lunch there is no such thing as a free lunch as we know uh and but people really want there to be a free lunch and that urge for there to be a free lunch is the underlying problem i think that people think that you can change human nature with by political means and that's always what gets us into trouble in the end and but it's so strong because people people are allured by by the the notion of the

free lunch that they can get something without having putting in the work to get it like and if we just rid ourselves of that and accepted that there's a cost to everything all the problems would go away like it's it's really that simple that's that's the basic notion and the basic premise of the book if you'll allow me to just give a quick example of that which i've seen recently um on my twitter feed i still have some shreds of don't ask me how the algorithm probably of people from my old normie life i used to work in the tech startup scene so a lot of entrepreneurs and tech ceos and people that are very privileged relatively speaking living here in israel but working like globally with silicon valley and and global investors and a lot of fiat investments and

vc money etc and so you hear some voices that are looking at the current economical situation in israel going uh okay so the flight the travel the travel um state in israel is quite dismal because most travel airline like most airlines canceling their flights to israel because of the war and while it's understandable it creates a situation where the israeli airline is becoming a monopoly it's the only one that's flying in and out and the prices are going up and the prices of flights generally speaking are going up and so people are experiencing a harder time to fly in and out of israel so this guy was completely like educated an entrepreneur tech entrepreneur probably has quite a bit of fiat in his bank account and he's living a pretty good life

relatively speaking he's like tweeting i don't understand why the israeli government would not subsidize flights for the tech the startup tech sector now being the leading sector in israel for contributing to the economy and the export of israel which is what we need right now we need to strengthen the economy. So why wouldn't the government subsidize our flights to make it easier for us? And so you see those people that are so educated that really they're calling for socialism. They have no idea what they're talking about. They're trying to solve one problem with another problem. And there is no financial literacy. There is no real good education in the market for those who are the most privileged the wealthiest and the most educated

and so it's so hard to see how we can change things when people still think that there are free lunches and there should be all the time the government should subsidize those flights for us because we're the smartest and the best and we give and we bring money to israel right so it's like an inherent problem yeah but if if you're in one of those big corporations and if you have a good high-paying job a nice title in one of those really big multinational things then you like government regulation because and you like subsidies because it's only market interventions that can lead to a monopoly like that can truly lead to a monopoly like all monopolies are artificial like that uh if there's a truly free market with no interventions whatsoever

then there's always an incentive for a newcomer to to be competitive to try to be competitive and the corporation that has the monopoly cannot set prices arbitrarily because people can choose another product like you can choose eggs eggs instead of bacon they can choose whatever government institutions cannot ever fix monopoly problems because they are the problem. They are the monopoly. They have the monopoly on violence and therefore they're the only ones that can create other monopolies.

And if you want to know more about this, then read Rothbard and Hoppe. I'd say they have both very nice explanations of why this is the case. Luke, did you want to add anything to that? Yeah, the first third of the book is building up this clown world idea. I won't say it's in a rigorous way. Plenty of authors have described what's going on with clown world in more detail. The point is to just sort of make sure the reader is on the same page as we are, so to say, at least close enough to it. But really, when we dig into it, it's like, what are the effects of living in Clown World?

What is the actual, on the individual, how does this affect everyone? We all have to live under this system of incentives, and it's just so hard to get ahead and make anything work. And so then we start to explore what are the solutions to this. And really, it just ends up being, as Knut said, get out of the system as much as possible. And, you know, these systems that the politicians in the states are living in and keep us in. Yeah, we all have to live wherever we live. And we all have to kind of deal with life as we are. But at least finally, we have opt outs. And I mean, this is this is the thing that's hopeful to me about Bitcoin, the thing that I I wish I could have gotten, you know, 10 years ago or before when I was wrestling with the same problems. The world had no solutions before Bitcoin for me. It was just keep doing the same things over and over, keep leaning into this rat race and trying to get to get ahead. I think another one of the analogies that Guy mentioned with us just the other night was that it's like at the airport when you have these walking sidewalks, like these moving sidewalks, but it's like you're walking in the wrong direction, right?

If you ever stop, if you ever stop walking, you'll go backwards, and you have to always, always go forward faster than you go backwards to beat the inflation and beat everything that's going on here. That's a great analogy. it is i can't take credit for it unfortunately but guy is guy is a smart guy thanks guy um but but uh great guy great guy but the the the main thing is is that now we have this this opt out and we have all of these opt outs and and i mean for my situation it's like i still work in fiat to pay my bills and then make sure everything is good short term but everything that i want to to store into the future is in bitcoin and all of my time that that i can put into it goes into it goes into bitcoin and my family the things that are important i i get paid to do my job i don't

do it i don't do it because i love it i do this stuff because i love it and and because i believe in it and what i hope that that readers get out of out of the book is not just seeing the the you know the parts of these these systems in the world i don't think we need to convince bitcoiners that clown world exists but i i think we did want to get at that there are solutions here and it's also not trying to preach to the choir either in the sense that yeah yeah bitcoin is the solution okay guys great like that's that's uh that's a pretty good message in the bitcoin community but there's more to it there's more to it that there that bitcoin really changes you Bitcoin really thinking differently about the world.

I think it's kind of like learning a new language. It completely rewires your brain. It literally rewires your brain to think in a completely different system. And Bitcoin is like thinking in a completely different system for money and math and numbers and everything. And it's just your behavior changes. And so it's sort of documenting what this is and also a call to action for readers and listeners eventually that take up the challenge, take up the responsibility to do as much as you can to make the world a better place. And that doesn't have to be through Bitcoin, but we're certainly advocating for that. This book is sort of a self-help book disguised as a Bitcoin book, something like that.

Not to sound cliched or anything, but that's how I see it. It really all comes into hoping to inspire self-reflection and self-driven change and improvement. I would say if we want it to scale, it has to be through Bitcoin. On a personal level, it doesn't necessarily have to be through Bitcoin. But if we want this to scale, Bitcoin needs to be a part of it because barter is not an alternative. like there's no civilization based on barter that's very interesting what you're saying i love it you're alluding to like the bitcoin doesn't have to be a part of it no no no we just talked about other we talked about other things right like it wasn't just

bitcoin that we talked about and like the entire the entire thread to it i don't know where you were going either knut so okay yeah sorry sorry no but look this is very interesting because you're you're kind of talking about the volume or the impact that that this change can have on your life so you're saying you can have you can make changes in your life by understanding the system that you live in and trying to opt out from it in various ways but if you want to create a bigger change and a more impactful change you want to collaborate with others and today the ultimate I would say, way to collaborate with other people in an honest way that kind of dictates honesty is through Bitcoin. It's harder to introduce corruption when you do things with Bitcoin,

on Bitcoin, right? Whether it's technological developments or trade or accumulation of wealth, etc that whether it's for a an individual a group a community or a state you know when bitcoin is being introduced to that entity if it's a an individual entity or a collective entity then it kind of injects some honesty into the entity um like the dna of bitcoin comes into that entity that's like the way i can interpret what you said um knud i think it's interesting yeah scale you need that no you made me think i mean i love that now what what i'm alluding to um let me see here uh let me collect my thoughts for a while i think the thing here is that through bitcoin you can find the people you can trust so if a person has

been in bitcoin for say 10 years and has never fallen off the bandwagon never taken the bag of shit coins never done anything questionable ethically whatsoever that's probably a pretty trustworthy person right oh sure so so this is the flip side of the don't trust verify thing ironically that leads to more trust in the end in the people that have have a clean track record you know so so you i trust bitcoiners more than i trust normies like that's just the default now which means ironically enough that when you trust another person completely you don't need money you can you can keep a tab on one another you can be just nice to one another and just you can just rely on the other person giving something of value back so so this is the irony

of the whole thing is that the more bitcoin takes over uh the role of global money the less we'll need money like to to facilitate trade i i think i think that we will find other ways and luke and me are a good example we we keep our tabs uh but we don't we don't put everything on the tab like he buys me a beer every now and then i buy him a dinner every now and then he buys me a dinner every now and then like who cares in the long run it's gonna it's gonna be good and so so we very rarely exchange like like with all people that you trust it's like within a family money rarely changes hands between between family members well it's from the whoever makes the money to the kids usually but not even that it's much easier within the group where you know people because money was

invented for that purpose or discovered for that very purpose to facilitate trade between people who didn't trust one another which is also why kyc policies are so weird and so backwards because it takes away the very basic functionality of money which is you you don't have to trust the other party you don't have to have proof that they're a legit person or something the money itself is supposed to be the proof and bitcoin is that proof fiat money is not perfect wonderful okay stay there knud i want to ask you about it's going to imply a question about el salvador but i'm going to ask you about legal tender versus volunteerism can you give me your take on it when when we define bitcoin as a legal tender versus saying you can just use

whatever currency you want this is well you choose legal tender laws as all other intellectual property laws are bullshit and i think they're they are counterproductive uh you shouldn't impose anything on any person like you shouldn't just as you shouldn't steal don't steal and don't violate other people's bodies like it's it's pretty simple humans have two ways of resolving conflict one is communication the other is violence avoid the violence and we're we'll all be better off so why do we put laws for no stealing no murdering we put laws for it yes don't steal and don't murder are uh derived from natural law so so those are the laws that actually make sense Laws that don't make sense are victimless laws, like victimless crimes, laws for victimless crimes.

So whatever I choose to put in my own body should not be forbidden because the only one I'm already paying the punishment. I'm already getting the punishment. Well, legal tender is not victimless because you are forcing people into a behavior that they might not have chosen by their own volition. so you're forcing people to behave in ways that they might not have chosen given given if they were given the choice so you're forcing them to use a particular type of currency usually the currency the government is has a hand in printing more of thereby enriching themselves that is not the case in el salvador but i don't still think and the law is so the people become the victim i just want to understand like how you define of course the people are the victim they're always

the victim when there's a government involved okay they they are forced to do things it's like they said well you're free to travel during covid but but you have to take the vaccines and wear a mask well then you're not free to travel of course you're free to travel if someone is does not have to follow any rules yeah to sell you a plane ticket and you don't have to follow any rules to get on the plane and fly to the other place i mean i'd say that no one on any flight is free to move because you need a passport that's which was introduced as a temporary political measure a hundred years ago so that's a bullshit thing yeah you need to go through a security check that's a bullshit thing you need to turn off your fucking wi-fi on the plane which is an obvious

bullshit thing like there are so many so many man hours spent on absolute fucking horse shit when you try to travel from one country to another and all of those resources could have gone into streamlining the airport into being something else than a cattle prodding institution you know i'm with you and this is this is it like and bitcoin allows us to trade with one another without a third party third parties have less of an incentive to to give a shit about that or they can't really because they don't know who has the bitcoin and they don't know how it works and anyone could own any number of bitcoins you simply cannot know how much another person owns which reduces the incentive for violence because it's simply not as profitable as it used to be

which in the long run removes all of this crap uh simply because we have a way of uh bypassing the the cancerous institutions and get the the the societal bloodstream flowing between the tumors and around them the tumors being government institutions so and regulations and bureaucrats and stuff so that's why i'm so excited about this and so passionate about this and you you alluded to a question before about why i do what i do yeah your take about el salvador then that has made bitcoin a legal tender yeah it it was bound to happen in some state at some point that some politician would take advantage of bitcoin's good name and make uh and i think bukele was a much better choice than many many other politicians still he is a politician he does work for

government and he does impose his power on people uh every now and then and if i was the president of el salvador instead of introducing bitcoin as a legal tender i would just have said there are no legal tender laws anymore you can use whatever whatever you want um because i think legal tender laws are inherently bad just like any other and the free market would sort itself out yeah it does and because who's to judge if that was the case or not like even if you if you have a totally free market and the society um this always happens a politician says that oh the free market wasn't good enough this and this happened and first of all they refused to take into account that this was not a free market because there were government subsidies and taxes

so it's not free this is not what would have happened had there been a free market and second who would be the judge of what is good and what is bad like how do you quantify that so take for instance uh the thing i talked about in the airports the security checks if you count up every minute that every passenger spends in that line you know removing their belt and and being harassed in that machine if you add up all the hours spent by the people employed sitting there and harassing people how fast do you think you would come up to a number of life minutes spent equivalent to

the life the life the life spans of the lives lost in the 9-11 tragedy which triggered the whole thing I'd say maybe half an hour or something if you take all the flights worldwide

that should count up to 80 lifetimes or whoever many died there maybe there were how many died in 9-11 I have no clue but on the planes it's like 80 people I think some thousands and some thousands in the buildings but even some thousands would be a couple of hours maximum in the security lines because if you see it as if you see time theft as a partial death

sentence then everything else comes into perspective so if you have a 50 tax in median tax in a country that means that everyone working in that country is 50 a slave a hundred percent tax rate means you're a hundred percent a slave which means you don't don't get to keep any of the fruits of your labor if you get to keep a hundred percent you're not a slave at all if you if you don't get to keep any of it in other words if you're taxed a hundred percent you're 100 a slave sure everything goes to your owner and if it's 50 50 well then you're somewhere somewhere in between you're half a slave so yeah if a normal family with a husband and a wife one of them is a slave it's just that the slavery is split up between the two

and so do you think that maybe we're like at a situation where bitcoin is just starting out to manifest its way into states and into larger communities larger collective communities and el salvador has taken that step in setting it as a legal tender clearly saying we we like this we want this we want people to use this and to have this and to be able to use it if they choose to because it's not the only thing that we tell them that is legal there's another one that is legal and they can choose from these two i understand that it's not optimal but it kind of feels for me like a pendulum swing and this the swing is going very far to the extreme we're making it a legal tender so that the adoption will start so that we kind of make sure that the

adoption will start on the state level so that there'll be at least one place where we try it out and maybe later other places will not make it a legal tender like when i spoke to samson he was saying if other countries just become friendly to it or accept it and be tolerant towards it like in madera like in other places then fair enough we can we don't need it to be legal tender and i understand it but it kind of feels like there's a pendulum swinging because of the beginning that we're in like the beginning of a process what do you think you know there's a chapter in the book called pendulum right oh yes i know that there's a chapter called pendulum but i didn't get to it yes it's about that no it's not about that it's more about how how we overcome humans tend to

overcompensate let's just say that but i mean the pit and the pendulum is a short story by edgar allen yeah yeah yeah you can guess the the that guy's last name anyway i think the the most fascinating things about a thing about uh nation states and large corporations adopting bitcoin yeah it is is that everyone seems to forget or everyone seems to not understand what not your key is not your coins actually mean what that implies yeah so difference between ownership and possession what is ownership ownership is a legal relationship between me and a thing like my property uh so i can say that i own something i can say that i own for instance i could own the books on behind luke on his bookshelf there i can say they're mine uh and uh but they're in

luke's possession so if i say can i have my books back please luke can choose to say no fuck off knut you've been annoying this week you're keeping the books you know and so so that is the the main difference between ownership and possession so nation states and corporations can own bitcoin which means they can legally own them and have a right to to them whenever they they can employ judges and courts and stuff to make sure that the bitcoin goes where they want them to go but as long as if they don't have the keys in other words if the bitcoin are custodied by a third party they are not in the possession of of el salvador or microstrategy you or anything else that is that is not the case they're in custody they're not your keys not your

coins and what not your keys you're not your coins alludes to is that bitcoin is even deeper than possession it's not ownership it's not possession it's just knowing a secret that's all owning a bitcoin all that means is that you know a secret uh it says nothing about anyone else knowing that secret like the the only way in which you own them and that you can that you can compare this knowledge of this key to any type of ownership is that you know that the likelihood of anyone else guessing the key is so low that it practically means that you own it like you that is the thing you trust but at the end of the day at its very core it's nothing but information which can all be copied and it's all on the internet so the only thing that separates the satoshi from from

anything else in the world is that it's a secret kept by you so you keep your 12 words you keep the you memorize the entire private key or you you write it down on a paper or a steel plate or whatever and you hide it somewhere it's still you keeping a secret you're the one who knows where that thing is and what it's for so this is the thing nation states cannot own bitcoin because they don't exist just like the satoshis they don't exist nation states are just a bunch of people that have that are following a bunch of rules set by some other mostly dead people and they're in rooms making decisions over other human beings and most of those decisions are made illegitimately because they're made against those other people's wills. And now that we have this

secret keeping mechanism, we can say, okay, go ahead and have fun in your little rooms and call yourself Israel or Sweden or Finland or Canada or whatever. But I'm not going to care. I'm going to live in my world and you cannot do anything about it. That is the power of Bitcoin. And it means corporations don't have any power anymore. They cannot leverage their ginormous stacks of money they cannot leverage their lower interest rates because of this or their lobbyism or their relationships with government and the governments themselves they can't leverage their power over people anymore because it's simply not profitable anymore because we can keep the money in our heads there the satoshis are us there is no distinction between my my uh my income

minus my expenditures my my life's work minus my expenditures can now stay within me within my physical body in my brain that's where i can store the sum of my efforts so i can literally become me like i can become what i did i can become my history i can keep it this is completely different from anything else and it has nothing to do with arbitrary constructions of the human mind like the corporation or the nation state or the religion or the whatever so what is new what is the meaning of a yeah i get it what is the meaning then of a treasury for a company or a country well these are transitory things and they are very fascinating and it's going to be extremely entertaining to see them play out because i foresee that i've foreseen this for

many years that sooner or later uh some big corporation who has not taken enough uh measures to secure their bitcoin and that don't have like the way to do it for a corporation would probably to be to have the board of the corporation have a giant multi-sig with some rules around it and some hierarchy in the keys or something some scheme like that yeah but that would require the entire board of that corporation to be tech savvy enough to actually be able to handle that and given that's even some very prominent bitcoin core developers are not able to do that properly like how the fuck would like the board of the coca-cola company do that i just don't see it so sooner or later they're gonna realize that they're gonna custody their bitcoin

with a third party yeah and they're gonna learn the lesson not your keys not your coins when they realize that the bitcoin were never theirs there some guy had all the bitcoins and some guy fucked off and bought an island somewhere and is nowhere to be seen some noom took all the money and so We are saying we're going to see some shenanigans in this. I don't call them shenanigans. I call them beautiful rebel moments and things that ought to happen. This is what is tearing down society as it is. It's the beauty of the last scene of Fight Club where all the skyscrapers fall down

and they're rebuilding everything because of this madman. And I feel the same kind of victory as Edward Norton does in that scene when it's just blown his face off because you think that that's going to teach a lesson no i think we're genuinely getting into a better world it's not this it's not this tearing everything down it's just tearing down institutions that leash value off of other people it all it destroys is third parties that that take stuff that isn't theirs okay that's what it's an antidote to because you cannot cheat the system so would you say that states and corporations should not be holding bitcoin in their treasuries or just not be holding it in multi-sig uh i'm saying that

states and corporations don't exist they don't that is what i'm saying okay all that exists is human beings and individuals and individual brains and bitcoins can only exist in brains nowhere else and if you want to call that a corporation fine go ahead there will be a person who will be let's say whatever the chief financial officer of a corporation and he'll be the one

that is entitled to hold the keys to the company's treasuries yes and all of a sudden one fine day he doesn't come to work they'll try to call him they'll go to his house

and he's not there anymore where is he nobody knows but he can afford to hide like for a long time it has already happened by the way this has happened on multiple occasions where's trace mayor for instance he disappeared didn't he maybe it's a bad example but like this is entirely possible and i would say even probable i mean and to go into definitions here what is a nation what is a corporation and on a bitcoin standard why does it have to be anything more than just a private chat group and a bitcoin it could be a fediment like it could be a a telegram chat it could be whatever like it could be a a spreadsheet somewhere as long as we trust one another uh or we don't even have to if we have

good enough tools but if we can bypass all that then all the other bureaucracy accounting goes away in terms of accounting that you have to do because the government tells you to you could decide the rules about accounting like of course it's it's it's uh important for a company to to do economic calculations and to to to plan ahead and see their incomes and their expenditures and whatnot keep profitable and have black numbers and stuff but all the bullshit like you have to vat for instance and taxes and inflation all of that goes away it's not necessary anymore you don't have to give two shits about it you can just do you can just do stuff as the joker so finally put it in the dark night you know so yeah we'll see where it leads but yeah i'm giving all

these examples of dark movies but i'm actually looking forward to this future because it's not dark it's it's great it's uh it's emancipation the the triumph of the individual over over the tyranny of the mass of the masses yeah end of rant love it interesting luke do you want to add anything this yeah this sort of philosophical thing i mean i think i think that that is one of the uh most interestingly controversial ideas that uh that knut has has popularized this uh yeah this idea that you are your your bitcoins is sort of the the summary of that that that bitcoins only exist with with a person and and it's and it's uh the the implications of this i think are the practical thing, right? I mean, corporations, they do exist to the extent that they are a shared

idea, right? But yeah, it's the people underneath them. It all comes down to the responsibility of the individual. And that might be scary. That might be scary that you have to take responsibility for your own life. And the solution is that you can't get everything handed to you. But once you come to terms with that and figure out how you're going to be in the world in a way that gives value to other people so that you can get value back and manage to live whatever that looks like whether that's through sending satoshis to each other or this type of pseudo barter that that knut talked about where where yeah you just you just don't care this this is a this is a funny thing we've talked about a while ago more a while ago was that is the is the number of transactions going to go

up on bitcoin as we go to hyper bitcoinization or is it actually going to go down like micro payments was one of the big buzzwords when talking about the the use of medium of exchange for for blockchains generally and and one of the big selling points of all of these altcoins many of is that they can send so many more transactions faster but who cares what are what's the value of those transactions what what what is the actual value being transferred what is the reason for transferring that value what is the reason for transmitting that message because bitcoin in and of itself the the contents of blocks is just messages but it's messages that we all agree on through the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin. But the thing is, who's going to care about the beer

or the meal or even maybe bigger things post hyper Bitcoinization? Who's going to care about maybe even things like rent or things like that will start to become less and less important as the marginal cost of production of everything trends towards zero in SaaS terms. And so the the volume of transactions might actually go down not up as hyper bitcoinization takes over and we just trade amongst ourselves and but we all have to take responsibility for that though and the degree to which you're able to and willing to take responsibility for yourself is i think the test that's that's going to determine how each individual is going to do as the world transitions to a system where you have to take that responsibility.

And it sort of echoes Atlas Shrugged a little bit as well, where it's like there is this group of people that is opting out of the system. And it is going to be painful for many of those left behind who just don't know how to deal with it. When the wealth slowly leaches out of the corrupt fiat system and makes its way into this Bitcoin economy. Then all of the governments that are buying votes with the capital of the productive members of society that get funneled away by taxes, when that disappears, all of the welfare states of the world are going to collapse if they don't employ strategies to mitigate that. And like the conversation about El Salvador, there are ways to do this that are non-coercive, right?

I mean, the point about the legal tender law is if anyone is forced, if anyone is coerced to do anything, no matter how benign that is, right? Well, that's still committing violence on some level against someone, right? so the the groups of people that decide to collectively work together for some goal i'll just say that vague vague word salad there to to refer to groups of people uh whether that's a nation state or a hobby club or a corporation or whatever you want to call it people are cooperating together towards some goal people will still continue to do that and it will look whatever it is into the future. Maybe the corporation is actually a fairly good idea. Private cities maybe are the way nation-states look like in the future or something like that.

But the corporations or groups of people that manage to navigate this transition into the new system the best are the ones that are going to thrive the most. And what I hope for is a scenario where we get to see this play out in real time and competition between nation states corporations groups of people can play out and and people can have the freedom to to move and to choose where they want to put their time and their effort and who they want to associate with it's all maybe it's a little utopian but i don't think we're actually that far from from a lot of this starting to play out and maybe to try to wrap this up a little bit is that i'm not i'm not hoping that countries and corporations put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but I am hoping that they do

something to figure out the system. And maybe it looks like that they start to accept Bitcoin for their goods and services, right? Or that if there is a surplus, they choose to save it in Bitcoin, but they have a method of safeguarding it that is sustainable and that there are ways of making sure that Bitcoin held in a collective group is able to stay within that group. And so I'm optimistic for the future. But yeah, I think the entire thesis of the Inversive Clown world is really that you have to become the anti-clown.

You have to become Bitcoin. You have to do the things. So that's the book. Yep, I'm with you. Thank you so much for this. This is a great wrap-up. i uh i'm going to attend uh an event which i think you have attended last year knut uh the liberty of our lifetime uh this year oh yeah the free cities uh conference i highly recommend it and that's one

of my favorite podcast episodes we did on the bitcoin infinity show with titus yeah titus gable is is a great thinker yeah i love the organization and poof this is a big thing to take on but this is what it's gonna look like it's like really really the seeds of it i think like the early seeds of it truly grassroots movements all all along very inspiring unfortunately a couple of them are quite into shit coins like that yeah a lot of them have fallen for shit i know scams and but that is a self-solving problem over time so like the ones that are exactly go on a bitcoin standard will will outlive the others and it's very interesting like how how can you manage free uh city states within nation states you were mentioning luke

yeah yeah uh yeah super interesting i'm gonna be speaking there this year and stefan as well and so we're going to be representing the bitcoin angle a little bit i i do want to ask you luke though you did you you referred to um you think the micropayments and payments the level of it is going to go down i don't think i understood why i can you try and explain it to me again i'm sorry if i'm a bit slow there no sure sure it's it's really down to that that people won't need to actually transmit a a store of value between one another right uh as much if they can just trust one another and the little things don't matter as much okay it ties ties into my little rant about how trust in one another actually goes up so you can keep tabs on one another what not

sure the irony of that that the don't trust verify enables more trust no sure like when When hyper-virtualization happens and we're all fabulously wealthy, who cares who picks up the check for the meal, right? And who cares about next time, you know? Yeah, I can totally see that happening. But we'll all be fabulously wealthy. That's the point. The entire world will be fabulously wealthy. Yeah, there's so much else that ties into this.

Like in a totally free market with no government interventions and no artificial monopolies, all prices fall to the marginal cost of production. which means everything gets cheaper which means all the bitcoiners get wealthier and everyone else too by the way because the production cost of everything goes down so even no coiners benefit from hyper bitcoinization and and it's it's so mind-blowing you know also this this fact that the fact that we are our bitcoins we are we are all satoshis is it means we all we help one if we help one another with whatever we're doing like we're doing now for instance we find we're finding it valuable to talk to you you're finding it valuable to talk to us this is a transaction like but there's there are no sats shots either way and absolutely no fiat shot between countries

there's not no iban number that we have to invoice one another here and there we're just giving each other value and this is the thing that bitcoin unlocks on so many levels because we're incentivized to help one another because the success of another bitcoiner is the success of us so we have a vested self-interest very selfish self-interest in seeing other bitcoiners succeed yeah and what could be more beautiful than that like at the end of the day bitcoin is just an agreement on a fixed set of rules and the reason we agree on this specific set of rules is that they are more expensive to break to try to break than to just follow which enables uh absolutely finite asset represented by a number which we can beam between our brains which means we are now one race truly

like we are the thing bob marley is saying about now like we're we're it was there all along like all we had to do was like not be assholes to one another and everyone's better off duh it's so obvious when you see it like that like uh isn't it yeah yeah there's another quote from the book it comes to mind excuse me for another rant here but like if you practice doing something do you get better at it or do you get worse at it usually you get better if you practice something yeah so why aren't all prices of absolutely everything going down over time the only reason they don't is that someone's printing money if if that was reflected in the money if the money was absolutely finite then everything else would

be abundant because all the prices would go down all the time which it does if you if you become a bitcoiner start denominating stuff in bitcoin you can experience this right now all of it and life is so much better without violence it's that fucking simple yes oh there is so much of that around me that yes i subscribe okay i want to ask you um i'm looking at the at the stable coins situation in the world now so on the one hand it's like a measure to help those in need in like hyperinflated countries to kind of, you know, get by with something that is better than their local shitty currency versus a tool to continue inflating fiat debt growth. On the other hand, how, especially in the light of CBDC discussion, okay, and how states

can take citizens to the next level of the digital control panopticon with a controlled currency, a controlled digital currency. How do you see the role of stable coins playing out in this? Okay, here's the thing. What I do in the space and what I've specialized in sort of is to take the thought vectors to their very extremes like to think as long term as possible okay because like i do that because of getting some axiomatic understanding of what this thing implies like okay back to first principles if this is true then this must be true therefore

in the long run this is true so i think both stable coins and cbdc's if they ever happen i suspect they won't happen they will be they will try to implement them but i think we have so much head headway and such a head start and i think bitcoin is actually winning it's just that people haven't realized it yet but but we are winning like all roads lead to bitcoin more more tether adoption means that more people eventually find bitcoin faster than they would have without tether so even though there's uh it is in a way fueling fiat it's also destroying fiat faster because the more fiat units there are the faster fiat goes away because its inflation go to infinity that's what it is uh so so i do see these things as very transitory and maybe they're interesting

to discuss short term and for the next decade and so on so on and so forth but i've i find it more fascinating to talk about like 500 or a thousand years down the line my great great grandchildren what can bitcoin do for them that's that's the discussion i want to have because no no that's exactly that your your take that i wanted to get because i know that you look at things long term so you're saying this is transitory this is just a phase absolutely in our transition yeah maybe it lasts for 10 years what do i know and then yeah like a double-edged sword it's helping but it's ruined like it's it's helping people but it's helping ruining fiat as well at the same time okay it's helping people but it's also putting a lot of of uh

wealth into hands that i mean who knows when when you start to talk about that i think tether started as sort of a hobby project by actual bitcoiners who just wanted to do a nerdy little thing and now it's extremely big and all of a sudden all the other big players are interested in it and since it's not like decentralized at all in the same way as bitcoin is and like it's not there are the same mechanisms are not at play here so they are part of the old part of the legacy system really and we'll see what happens but it's just another one of those financial things that that are transitory i mean i think the whole finance sector goes away on a bitcoin standard because there's no need for it anymore like why would you need it like you can all profit

split you don't even need salaries like you don't need anything you as i said you need a chat group that's your company all your employees can have a cut of whatever you make and we all can have banks look like knut they wouldn't exist they wouldn't be at all no banks at all i think i think there would be banks in the sense that there would be a small demand for credit on bitcoin but not at all as big as it is now i think there is still uh and there's a case to be made that money was sort of invented to uh as a tool to manage credit in the first place like that it's sort of a chicken and the egg problem there if commodity money or money

as credit was which one was before the other because the earliest scribblings ever found were ledgers which alludes to these loans being a thing in Mesopotamia 5,000

years ago and so on and so forth where I'm going with that is that if you have an absolutely finite money supply then everyone can actually live within their means because all of the increased productivity of all humankind goes to everyone so we're all better off and if we're just patient which which bitcoin teaches us to be because if you have a deflationary currency uh you you won't you don't want to spend it you want to save it and watch it go up in value later which means that you will only invest

if you think the investment will outpace the number go up in the purchasing power go up in Bitcoin terms. And it's very, very hard to figure out a business that can actually outpace Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a reflection of everything else in the economy. So like the need for big loans and big mortgages and taking on big debt, that is a fiat game and it doesn't work. it's not the same on bitcoin it's very very different so so yeah short term sure there'll be more death bubbles there'll be more spirals into this and that uh post hyper bitcoinization the world looks very different from now um there'll be many people that didn't didn't succeed to gain bitcoin on time

Will they be Bitcoin-less when we're on a Bitcoin standard? Do you think there'll be, we're looking at like levels of rich people and poor people. Would that not exist in a Bitcoin standard? The funny thing there is if you look at statistics of how many Bitcoins there are in each UTXO, like how many bitcoins there are in each address then you can see that the the number of addresses with 10 000 bitcoins or more are shrinking in numbers and 100 000 bitcoin and more they are also shrinking numbers but addresses with one bitcoin or less in them are growing in numbers so what this means as is that bitcoin is actually redistributing wealth because the only way you can

leverage your large bitcoin stack is to spend it and then it goes into a smaller address because the the the more that stack grows in value the higher the risk becomes for its holder because you're the one responsible for that entire wealth pool that is there and so there are so many things that can happen you could have amnesia you could go all sorts of problems that come with total personal responsibility so you would want to diversify you would want to buy a couple of houses you would want to buy this and that you would want to invest in companies just to mitigate the risk of having yes and what happens then is that the wealth gets redistributed right bitcoin is actually redistributing wealth by doing the exact opposite of what those that

claim to be redistributing wealth the socialists are doing but in the exact opposite it's actually redistributing wealth and i find that insanely fascinating and very very beautiful and it's it's it strikes me to my rebel core it's like a 360 fuck you to the powers that be and it's peace and love on the other side and i love it i love it too wow that's a great message to end on luke what's your message for ending this beautiful conversation My message, and I mean at the risk of repeating myself, is figure out what you need to do to take more responsibility, put more load on your shoulders, and figure out what you need to do to move forward in a way that you can feel good about and move into the new system in a way that puts you, your family, your friends in a better place. It all comes down to you. Love it.

wonderful you guys I'm going to see you very soon in like a couple of weeks in Amsterdam we should go have a dinner together Luke is not coming I believe

so it's only me but we're doing a panel together yes we are we're doing a panel about education I don't know if after this conversation people want to learn from us but whatever Mir is there to save us

exactly mir is amazing and isa is gonna spice it up oh yeah yeah yeah it's gonna be fun i look forward to it me too guys thank you so much for what you're doing this is really great i love the way you think i love the way you convey your messages i love the fact that you are unapologetic and you go all in with who you are and spread your freedom vibes all over this is uh it's a blessing we need more people like you and thank you for doing what you're doing appreciate your time thank you for your kind words yeah thanks for having us on ifrat it's been a great conversation peace out